Sherry Markovitz brings forth her art by looking back to childhood

REGINA HACKET, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

By REGINA HACKETT, P-I ART CRITIC

Published 10:00 pm, Sunday, June 15, 2008

Sherry Markovitz with one of her works in progress at her South Seattle studio. Her sculptures and paintings are labor intensive, but the labor doesn't show.
Photo: Paul Joseph Brown/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Start with Rose. She's a black-faced white ewe painted in 1979 by Sherry Markovitz. The painting marks the beginning of the artist's retrospective, "Shimmer," that occupies the entire third floor of the Bellevue Arts Museum. In gouache and egg tempera on rice paper affixed to linen with beading in the cracks, "Rose" is a portrait of the artist's mother, or, more precisely, a portrait of the artist's feelings about her mother.

"My father had a presence. You could cut it," she said. "He was charming and funny but quick to lose his temper. My mother was the opposite. She was mine. I held onto her physically whenever I could. I wouldn't let her go."

In "Rose," a dark lamb nurses, its head buried in the ewe's fleece. At the other end of the painting's long horizontal space, a pair of siblings (her siblings) are more self-sufficient.

Bruce didn't start with photographs, even though, in the mid-1970s, after graduating from the University of Washington with a master of fine arts degree in printmaking, Markovitz was best known for them. It was as a photographer that she made her debut at and/or, Anne Focke's decisively influential arts center on Capitol Hill, in a solo exhibit titled "Women: Body, Space and Personal Ritual," curated by Lucy Lippard.

Markovitz ringed and/or's walls with black-and-white images of women as a kind of open book. Through their gestures we know them, the life rituals that link them to each other and push them away. For a young artist, the attention was gratifying, but Markovitz chafed under the limitations of the medium. For her purposes, the camera had two flaws: It was too objective and too intrusive.

"I wanted to do portraits but couldn't face the idea of a human being," she said in a recent interview in her South Seattle studio. "With a camera, you have to take the person into account. I wanted to focus on my relationship with the person, not the person, and I wanted nothing between me and that relationship."

Living in Fremont in the 1970s, she liked to walk through Woodland Park Zoo, free admission at the time, and study the animals. It was on one of these walks that she hit upon a fundamental displacement, that she could engage her feelings more directly if she painted animals to represent them.

"Rose" is her mother and "Big Donk" her father, painted after his death in 1979 and seen through the scrim of death, a pale animal whose face is a mask, remote despite the fawns at his feet.

More than any artist since Louise Bourgeois, Markovitz makes art inspired by her childhood.

Her father had made his own way in the world since his early teens and rose to become the owner of a car dealership. Her mother, a pianist trained as a nurse, stayed home to take care of her family. Born and raised in Chicago, Markovitz remembers her mother rushing around, doing things for everybody else, and prizes the time they spent together in the basement, Markovitz playing with her dolls and her mom ironing as she listened to Studs Terkel on the radio.

"I loved that in those moments she could be calm and content," said Markovitz. "It's a memory of pleasure, seeing my mother enjoying herself."

That childhood was comparatively sunny, save for one thing: Her parents were part of the global generation of Holocaust Jews, and their lives reverberated in its aftershocks.

An unsettling burden

Markovitz was aware of it at a young age. Her Hebrew school teacher was a survivor, and her family knew others. Markovitz felt inspired by them and encouraged by survival itself, but acknowledges that genocide was a shadow on her life, being "introduced to something that senseless" when she was small.

At 16, on a trip to Israel, she saw photos of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele's experiments on children, in particular two boys whose penises had been removed.

"I thought, 'I don't want this burden,' " she said. "I wanted a life outside this experience. I could marry a Jew and be a Jewish wife, or I could be an artist."

She chose artist. After getting a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, she picked a school on the other side of the country, which brought her to Seattle. Married to artist Peter Millett, they have a son, Jacob Millett, now in college in California, born three years after Markovitz's mother died.

Every morning Markovitz walks her dog, Tina, around Seward Park on Lake Washington. Her house is set high amid trees. Watching the leaves fall and come again anchors her life.

And yet every winter she reads books about the Holocaust. Asked if her sister and brother read them too, she nodded. "I think they read them year-round."

Beneath the shimmer of her painted and beaded surfaces, there's a chaos, and the answer to that chaos is beauty.

Although she took painting classes at the University of Washington, Markovitz taught herself to paint in a method that is singular to her. She approached it domestically, as her mother approached the laundry. For her earliest paintings, she affixed rice paper to stretched linen with gesso and painted them. After covering their surfaces, she cut them out of their frames, dragged them into the backyard and washed them down with a garden hose, washing, repainting and washing again. In the end, the paper was seamed, torn, crushed and pounded. She left most of it ruined, but repaired large tears with beads.

Painting wasn't enough, however, and here's where her habit of walking around town and looking into shop windows paid off. On Capitol Hill she came across a taxidermy shop going out of business. Before she knew what she'd do with them, she bought fiberglass animal moulds from the owner.

Covered in papier-mache, they became her animal heads, first painted with a little beading, and then entirely beaded. They are more totem than trophy, more relic than target.

To her busts of bears, deer and donkeys and the occasional rabbit she added dolls and doll clothes. Each carries what its story requires, beads for some, buttons, feathers, shells, sequins, silk flowers and lace for others. For bears only, there's copper and mud.

Although she has had solo exhibits outside Seattle -- at New York's Artist Space and the now defunct Monique Knowlton Gallery -- and has been featured in nearly all the exhibits highlighting artists who work with beads, she exhibits rarely and works slowly, without assistants.

A gradual acceptance

Even so, her work is gradually acquiring its own art-world foothold. She was part of the "Good Doll Bad Doll" exhibit that recently finished a run at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, Calif., guest curated by Michael Duncan, and will have a show in Santa Monica next year.

Her sculptures and paintings are labor intensive, but the labor doesn't show. Encrusted as they are, they are spare with a serene confidence in their ability to express the complexities that are their reasons for being.

Lately, she is painting in gouache on silk, loading the surfaces before tossing the results in the washing machine and painting again, hanging them on clotheslines to dry with "the right amount of wrinkle."

Because the silk retains impressions from earlier painting, they are in the end ghostly shadows of other faces beside the faces that dominate.

These silks hang lightly on the wall, and the paintings on them could be dreams, half of dolls and half of people, dolls and people merged. In "Mother and Daughter" (gouache, velvet and beads on silk), she and her mother are both separate and fused, two people whose bond causes their boundaries to blur. Hung around the front room of the Greg Kucera Gallery, the paintings remind her of her first major exhibit at and/or, the photos that wrapped the room to tell a story.

The Bellevue Arts Museum has never looked so light and contemplative as it does with her work in it. The Kucera show features recent work, including the paintings on silk. Having just taken a number of them to Chicago for the Chicago Art Fair, Kucera was startled when people came up to him and asked, "Is this artist Jewish?"

"Yes," he said, mystified as to how they knew.

The weight of her culture is in her work, and her brilliance is that she makes it float.